In providing telephone service to buildings, particularly larger commercial buildings, it is usually necessary to provide a telephone service entrance to the building to provide interconnection between a telephone company cable leading up to the building and telephone wiring and cabling within the building. For various reasons it is desirable to have this interconnection at the exterior of the building. This saves space within the building, and also eliminates the need for providing access within the building to telephone service personnel on a continuing basis, for example whenever lines are reassigned within the building to new tenants. Keeping such activities exterior to the building affords the building owner or tenant greater flexibility and freedom in use of the interior space.
For typical commercial buildings, a buried telephone company cable, for example a 600-pair cable, is brought up to an outside wall of the building, and the contractor for the construction of the building provides internal telephone cabling which is routed internally of the building to the wall adjacent the end of the buried telephone cable. A terminal or cabinet is then needed adjacent the outside of the building to make the connections between the telephone company cable and the internal wiring and cabling. The cabinet must of course be weatherproof, relatively secure and ponder sufficient interior space for splices, terminal blocks, lightning protectors and other associated equipment which may be required. Numerous cabinets for this purpose are available in the prior art.
However, existing telephone service entrance cabinets are subject to numerous disadvantages, primarily in their lack of flexibility in adapting to different mounting and connection requirements for different types of buildings. For example, when providing telephone service to new buildings, it is obvious that the size of the building and the number of telephone customers within a building will vary greatly from one building to the next. In the past this has meant that it was necessary to stock more than one size of service entrance cabinet, which creates additional complexity and cost. Also, if there is a great increase in the telephone use within a building after it is constructed, the previously-installed service entrance cabinet may be too small to handle additional cables or connections, necessitating a costly removal and replacement of the entire service entrance.
Another problem with existing service entrance cabinets is that they are inconvenient to work on when it is necessary to gain access to the terminal blocks for adding, deleting or changing subscribers' telephone lines. In many commercial buildings, for example shopping centers, there may be changes on a more or less continuous basis, for example when tenants open business, close or move to a different location within the building. With existing service entrance cabinets, a considerable amount of disassembly is required to gain access to the connections, thus requiring additional servicemen's time.
Another difficulty with existing cabinets is a lack of flexibility in positioning and mounting of different components within the cabinet, since most have prepunched or predrilled metal mounting panels which are designed to accept predetermined components and terminal blocks. This causes difficulties and on-site reworking if the customer decides to mount different terminal blocks or components from that for which the cabinet was designed, or if conditions and usage change requiring additional or different components.
A further problem is that the actual position of the contractor-provided cable access opening in the building may be off several inches or more in any direction from that which was specified in the original building plans. Since the terminal cabinet is intended to be mounted on and partially buried in the ground, installation difficulties can arise when the access opening in the building and the access opening provided in the cabinet do not align, which may necessitate a considerable amount of time in repositioning the cabinet, enlarging its opening or the like.